thinking + motherhood = feminist

Boys love their mothers differently

When Andrea J. Buchanan wrote this piece she was the mother of a little girl and was also pregnant with a boy. She began to hear a lot of stereotypes from others about how boys love their mothers differently to girls, presumably better than girls. She started to consider this stereotype further…

.. our relationships with our daughters are more complicated than our relationships with our sons. We are conflicted. We want our daughters to do everything our sons do, yet as mothers ourselves, we know the difficulties and the hard choices they will have to make when they grow up and choose to mother – the career options that dwindle; the daily balancing act that exhausts; the kind of things our sons will never face, even as they become parents themselves. Perhaps it’s easier to love our sons because there is no big secret, no truth we’re withholding about the divided life of women. Perhaps we feel less conflicted about boys – love them more, believe they love us differently than our daughters do – because they will have such unconflicted, uncomplicated autonomy as men.

.. It feels as though I am being told to love a boy because he is my link to power, to empowerment, to unencumbered motion through the world. It feels as though I am being told that girls remind us how we are constricted by our gender; that boys set us free.

… “Boys love their mothers differently,” the nurse assured me that day as she watched me wrestle with my complicated daughter. But I think she had it wrong. Maybe mothers love their boys differently, not the other way around.

From Buchanan’s piece in It’s a Boy: Women Writers on Raising Sons.

I have just finished the book, It’s a Boy and my mind keeps coming back to the passage above. I find it a fascinating if not troubling theory.

There are some excellent pieces in this collection; Catherine Newman’s beautifully composed Pretty Boy, Jennifer Lauk’s sinister It Takes a Village, Susan Ito’s heartbreaking Samuel and Katie Kaput’s compelling Things You Can’t Teach (about being a transsexual parent and getting your head around your child’s masculinity), are all stand-outs. But there are also a few grating pieces in this collection, ones that I found to be bogged down with cumbersome stereotypes about gender. Still, I read this to get me thinking more about the experience of having a son and this book certainly got me doing that.

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26 Responses

As the stay-at-home dad of a boy, that passage made me roll my eyes a bit. Not just because of the hopelessly essentialist assumptions that it’s founded on, but because my relationship to my son is not uncomplicated.

It might be uncomplicated, if I accepted the gendered power he is supposed to be born into, but I don’t. I specifically don’t want him to grow up to “have such unconflicted, uncomplicated autonomy as [a man].” I want him to be conscious of his privilege because male privilege is not something that exists in a vacuum from female oppression: the big secret of the “divided life women” should not be kept from boys either, lest they perpetuate the situations and structures that make that true in the first place.

Thinking of all that makes my relationship to him complicated enough that it’s at least on the same scale as how complicated a relationship with a daughter would be, even if not complicated to exactly the same degree.

Scott, loved your comment, thanks for such a thought-provoking response.

Andrea Buchanan’s observations were made as a mother about her son and I wonder if what she was tapping into was a sense that for a woman raising a son you might get a little taste of power that you would never otherwise attain, that you get to live somewhat vicariously as a man through raising your son, that he goes on to have freedoms and authorities that you yourself will never have.. it is still an uncomfortable notion for me but I have certainly heard other mothers talk about something similar to this idea.

Ew, that quote is yuck, not least because of the author’s acceptance of the inevitablity and inescapability of prescribed gender roles.

i have two friends with teenage daughters and yes, that relationship is often complicated. i do think that some complications relate to gender roles, but more to do with the young person’s body image, feeling good about themselves, dealing with (and dealing out) the more subtle “feminine” aggressions (emotional manipulation, covert bullying)….

but hell, most of that is parenting adolescents, not daughters particularly. although in my family, i do admit that me and my sisters were terribly feisty in our teens, whereas my brother was cruisy. geez us girls were mean to our mum. i feel awful about that now when i see how devoted my friends are to their kids. and knowing one day they might turn around and say I HATE YOU MUM!

When I discovered that I was expecting a little fella – I was in shock. I had a daughter, my sister had daughters my cousin had daughters – I never saw myself as a mother to a son. As a mother I felt confident in my ability to raise smart, strong women – a boy into a man – more of a grey area. A more experienced mother of young adults of both genders told me that having boys are less complicated as long as you have a cupboard full of bread to make sandwiches where her relationships with her daughters were more complicated & angst ridden. Fingers crossed that parenting a son will be that easy & have filed that advice away.
I believe that children love their parents differently (not less or more) as parents love each of their children differently. Is this is a result of gender, personality or when and how the children came into our lives – do we know?
Your post is timely as this morning I said to my 4 year old son how grateful I was to have a son. On cue he turned around pointed his naked bottom at me and did “farty” sounds before grabbing hold of his penis & doing “pissing” sounds…..ahh thank goodness for little boys!! ”

jo – I think there is definitely something in what you said about there being an extra difficulty to overcome as a parent in raising a child of the opposite gender to yourself. There is something a little intimidating about it, about not thinking you can rely so much on your own personal experiences growing up to navigate your child’s. I have seen many single parents express this view.

I find this a bit of a difficult thing to read. I have a four year old girl and a two year old boy. They are different, but is that gender or position in family or personality at play.

I feel, that when people say, ‘boys are less difficult’, or ‘ a full fridge and space to run keeps boys happy’, it does boys and society a great disservice – not to mention girls.

In my experience my little boy has a great capacity for tenderness and at times loads of energy that needs to run free – just as my daughter does. His needs are often communicated quite differently to the way my daughter does – but I wouldn’t say one is more difficult than the other. I would say that with each child, regardless of gender, as a mother I need to tune in and understand the nuances of their makeup. I would hope all of these little differences did not need to be shrouded in gender.

It also begs the question, are girls and women destined to be labelled ‘difficult’ for ever. Are boys destined to be seen as fairly simlple and without the contradictions or complexities that are expected of women. I think raising boys and girls can for the most part be the same, as both genders need an understanding of societal stereotypes with the hope of transcending them. And all the other needs are so human, regardless of gender.

Surely starting out the parenting journey so focused on gender and the way the gender of your baby will affect your parenting is a way of perpetuating the steroetypes, rather than moving beyond them.

I don’t feel I am hiding some great secret from my daughter, that would surely make parenting a whole other level of tiring.

I completely agree with you about those dreadful stereotypes about boys and how they are simple creatures with simple needs where as girls are these mecurial beings who can never be pleased. And it was those kind of sentiments I found really annoying in some of the pieces in that collection.

But isn’t Buchanan arguing here not in support of the stereotypes themselves but that we examine what issue is behind them that causes mothers to persist with them, and that is that it is really about how they are relating to their child and not about how their child is.. that they have an uncomplicated relationship with their sons because they see them as having uncomplicated autonomy as a future man? It is a big generalisation about mothers, obviously feminist mothers particularly will be trying to unpack their response to and perception of their children.

This rings very true to me – I have a very complex and generally unhappy relationship with my mother. It got that way the moment I was taller and heavier than her, because all her body insecurities came down on me (she is tiny and skinny, I am tall and fat, though as a teenager I was just tall, muscular and pear-shaped). My brothers’ relationship with her is far less complex and much closer and more honest (even though one of them is also fat), and it’s something I wish I could have. I know it’s not her fault as an individual, even though sometimes I’m angry at her for not helping me resist the narratives about female bodies, but at the same time, I’m glad she doesn’t have granddaughters, only grandsons, who she can love in that direct and apparently easy way.

Pissweakparent’s comments really resonated for me as a mother raising two girls. I’m very uncomfortable when I am told that girls are more difficult. I don’t like the essentialist implication and I don’t like the suggestion that women are ultimately more comfortable with boys/men than women/girls.

I’ve never thought about my relationship with Lu and Nell in terms of their possibly constrained futures, in terms of secrets and the withholding of truths. Indeed, when I see them, I can’t imagine them being anything other than the autonomous, unconflicted and independent people they are now; they are so utterly sure and unapologetic about their place in the world. Thinking critically I realise this may well alter, but in my day to day life the potential change is not a touchstone for how I see them and how I love them.

Nor do I feel that comments about the difficulty of girls ‘feel[s] as though I am being told that girls remind us how we are constricted by our gender’; rather, they seem to me to be referenced to an essentialist view of girls and the impossiblility of true communion or friendship between women, which is a dominant theme in cultural constructions of female relationships (dumping girlfriends for a boy, cat fights, gossip, etc).

I find my relationship with Lu to be very different to my relationship with Nell: personality, birth order, changing life and work circumstances, changing care arrangements, my changing identity all contribute to that difference, as do their different points of development. And the ways they love me and I love them are both simple and complex – which is surely the case in any love relationship.

Is there a companion book ‘Women writers on raising their daughters’? I’m sure there’s something on men writers raising their daughters, and I’m equally sure that most of it would make me want to puke.

I sometimes wonder how much the differences women experience between sons and daughters has more to do with the way fathers interact. My other half was told so many times that daughters love their daddies more than sons – he can’t fail to treat her differently – with more expectations of love and acceptance from her – and these become self-fulfilling prophecies.

I think there is a lot of the self-fulfilling prophecy in this stuff. Boys are simple if you ignore the complexities. Girls are complicated if you always assume there is complexity in their behaviour.

I have only one child, a son, and I grew up with only sisters, no brothers, so it’s a bit difficult to make personal comparisons.

However, my mother has never seemed to get over the fact that her daughters have turned out to be so different to her in both appearance and tempermant.

Perhaps with children of one’s own gender it is easier to slip into the notion that they will be just like you.

Perhaps the fact that I have a son makes it easier for me to have no expectations on this level; easier to marvel at and enjoy his complete individuality. I am not looking for similarities on any level. (Or perhaps I’m reacting against my experience as the child in the equation.)

I have to de-lurk here as this subject is very interesting to me, because I have an older son and a younger daughter, so I have given this some thought over the years. I think relationships with our children can be quite fluid, with more and less complexity depending on the age and stage of the child, and the circumstances of parents.

I did notice some extra complexity in my relationship with my daughter at times, but I felt it a complexity brought by me rather than my daughter’s personality. Like many mothers, I’m the primary caregiver and have been always. I am also my daughter’s primary role model – she looks to me for “the right” way for a female person to behave. This had made me more thoughtful about myself and my actions, who I am and what sort of woman I want to be. It isn’t always comfortable to be someone’s role model like that, and that can make a relationship “complex”. I wonder if more men were primary care givers would they feel more of the complexity involved in being primary role models for their sons?

I think it’s very simplistic to reduce our relationships with sons/daughters down to girls are complex/boys are not anyway…….my relationship with my son is also very complex – he’s great and I adore him, but he’s got my personality down to a tee, including the bits of my personality I don’t like and don’t want for him, as I feel it will hold him back. As my daughter doesn’t have those traits of mine, in many ways our relationship is LESS complex!

I feel we should welcome the complexity of our relationships with our children. It helps us and them to remember that we are all just people, doing our best to get along and both understand each other and make ourselves understood.

I’m not feeling the quote, at all, not for me or for our family. I feel like raising my son is very complicated, partly because I’m trying to raise him with awareness of privilege and social justice.

With a girl, I imagine that would involve drawing parallels between us, having a certain sense of ‘you and me may have similar experiences with privileged folk, and this is how it might feel’; with my son, I’m dealing with someone who is likely to be on the other side of the gender privilege divide, and I’m trying (slowly, slowly) to teach him about how to move through that responsibly, which is something I have no personal experience of (in the particular case of gender). That’s complicated.

In essence, I don’t want him to have “unconflicted, uncomplicated autonomy as a man”. If he’s completely unconflicted about his privilege, he’s doing it wrong.

I think some of the essentialism that I think is getting worse in childrearing comes from the small size of families. If you only have one boy and one girl, you may tend to assume that the differences between them, and between your feelings for each of them, are linked to their gender difference. I have five children, three boys and two girls. For my kids, it seems clear that while gender influences their lives, there are far greater differences between the individuals than between the girls on the one hand and the boys on the other. My relationships with them have been easiest or most challenging, not on the basis of gender but on far more individual things.

I have two sons, and am one of two daughters, and a son. My relationship with both of my boys is different from each other as they are different people. My sister and I are very different, and my mother frequently has commented how I was the easiest of her children. So…I don’t accept this notion at all and think perhaps it sets us backwards in gender ideas rather than forward.

I have two sons and one daughter. I really appreciate the comments refuting the notion that sons are simple and daughters are complicated. In fact I am angered by that notion. As someone has pointed out: it does a disservice to both genders. Added to this is the hidden meaning (and not so hidden) that complicated=DIFFICULT. So therefore men are “easy” and women, well, not so much.
I have been married for over 19 years and have found my husband to be complicated=interesting. Far from being simple, all three of my guys are quite complicated. And my daughter as well; complicated and interesting.

The fact that parents especially mothers would love their kids differently based on gender is just an example of how messed up our society really is. Both boys and girls have their complexities as much as their simplicities. The problem is that mothers limit if not oppress their daughters in some kind of strategy to form them into society’s ideal ladies. when girls are infants they show the same level of curiosity and thirst for adventure as their counterparts but when they get to the ages of five they start to get cues and talks from their mothers on how ‘good girls’ are supposed to behave meanwhile the boys are left to explore their own little worlds undisturbed. Most mothers constrict their girls because that was how they were raised by their own mothers and also because as women they cannot just stand to see another member of their gender truly happy and free and these are the same mothers that will go on the internet or write some stupid book and comment on how boys are easier to raise than girls. It’s crazy and whats with ‘they will have such unconflicted, uncomplicated autonomy as men.’ Women have that kind of autonomy also, it’s just that as women we are trained to depend on others to make choices for us and this is what we go teach our daughters. Why can’t we raise our daughters to be Margaret Thatchers instead of Doris Days. Hmmmmm?

This is all so interesting to read – I don’t have any girl-children, but I do frequently hear how much more allegedly “easy” I have it than those friends of mine who have girls. I never really know what to say. Right now if I’m lucky I can laugh it off with “easy in some ways, maybe.”

I certainly don’t feel as though my children are uncomplicated; they are as moody and mercurial as I can be, and I always feel like they’re a few steps ahead of me.

I do wonder though, sometimes, if I’d have been as good at raising a girl. I’ve struggled in my life with relating to other girls and women in it, and although I know how to relate to boys who like “girl stuff,” I don’t know that I would have been able to do all right by a girl who got into “girl stuff.” I suppose it’s just as well that I have the kids I do.